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Curried Tripe
Cut the tripe into small pieces. Slice two or three onions, according to size, place them in a stewpan with a lump of butter, and brown them over a quick fire. Put the tripe in with the onions, pour in enough broth to cover it, and stew gently until tender. Put one teaspoonful of flour in a basin with one tablespoonful of curry powder; then stir in slowly one-half teacupful of cream and one teacupful of broth. When quite smooth stir the curry in with the tripe, and boil it for a few minutes longer, until thickened, stirring now and then. When cooked, turn the tripe onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A plain Anglo-Indian stew that depends almost entirely on how long you cook the tripe. Everything else is a five-minute finish.
- Buy the right tripeHoneycomb tripe from the second stomach is the standard choice and holds sauce best. Nearly all tripe sold today is already scalded and bleached, but it is not cooked; rinse it well and expect to simmer it until it yields.
- "Stew gently until tender"This is the hinge of the dish and the book gives no time. Cleaned honeycomb tripe generally needs 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, or about 45 minutes in a pressure cooker. Undercooked tripe is rubbery and no amount of sauce will fix it.
- TeacupfulPeriod sources are inconsistent: a teacupful is variously reckoned at 4 to 6 fluid ounces. Taking the larger figure, read the half teacupful of cream as a scant 1/2 cup and the teacupful of broth as about 3/4 cup. The quantities are forgiving; adjust to the thickness you want.
- Quick fireHigh heat. The onions are meant to take real color, which is most of the sweetness in the finished sauce, so give them 10 minutes rather than 3.
- Curry powderA tablespoonful of commercial curry powder in a hotel kitchen of the 1890s meant a mild, turmeric-heavy Anglo-Indian blend. Modern blends vary widely in heat; taste yours and start with two teaspoons if it is assertive.
- Bloom the flour and curryStirred cold into cream as written, raw curry powder tastes dusty. Cooking the flour and spice briefly in a little butter before adding the liquids, or letting the finished sauce simmer a full 5 minutes, clears that off.
- BrothBeef or veal stock suits it; the tripe cooking liquid is the convenient choice for the sauce, since the recipe uses broth in both places.
- CroutonsThe recipe says only croutons of fried bread. Fry small pieces of white bread until dry and gold; they are there for texture against soft tripe, so fry them hard.
- YieldAbout 1½ lb of tripe serves four as a main course, with rice or boiled potatoes.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) was assembled while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and its enormous scope — some nine hundred pages covering everything from consommé to tripe — is that of a hotel kitchen's full repertoire. Tripe was cheap offal, long a staple of British and American working kitchens, and curry powder was a common Victorian way of dressing up an inexpensive cut. Commercial curry blends had been sold in London since the late eighteenth century and reached American grocers well before Oscar's day, arriving as a thoroughly Anglicized product rather than anything an Indian cook would recognize. The result is a dish that sits at the intersection of hotel refinement and household thrift — cream, croutons and a spice tin, applied to a stomach lining.